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What is a Femtocell?
In telecommunications, a femtocell—originally known as an Access Point Base Station—is a small cellular base station, typically designed for use in residential or small business environments. It connects to the service provider’s network via broadband (such as DSL or cable); current designs typically support 2 to 5 mobile phones in a residential setting. A femtocell allows service providers to extend service coverage indoors, especially where access would otherwise be limited or unavailable. The femtocell incorporates the functionality of a typical base station but extends it to allow a simpler, self contained deployment; an example is a UMTS femtocell containing a Node B, RNC and GSN with Ethernet for backhaul. Although much attention is focussed on UMTS, the concept is applicable to all standards, including GSM, CDMA2000, TD-SCDMA and WiMAX solutions.
For a mobile operator, the attractions of a femtocell are improvements to both coverage and capacity, especially indoors. There may also be opportunity for new services and reduced cost. The cellular operator also benefits from the improved capacity and coverage but also can reduce both capital expenditure and operating expense.
Femtocells are an alternative way to deliver the benefits of Fixed Mobile Convergence. The distinction is that most FMC architectures require a new (dual-mode) handset which works with existing home/enterprise Wi-Fi access points, while a femtocell-based deployment will work with existing handsets but requires installation of a new access point.
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What is a Picocell?
A picocell is wireless communication system typically covering a small area, such as in-building (offices, shopping malls, train stations, etc.), or more recently in-aircraft. A picocell is analogous to a WiFi access point.
In cellular wireless networks, such as GSM, the picocell base station is typically a low cost, small (typically the size of a sheet of A4 paper and about 2-3cm thick), reasonably simple unit that connects to a Base Station Controller (BSC). Multiple picocell ‘heads’ connect to each BSC: the BSC performs radio resource management and hand-over functions, and aggregates data to be passed to the Mobile Switching Centre (MSC) and/or the GPRS Support Node (GSN).
Connectivity between the picocell heads and the BSC typically consists of in-building wiring. Although originally deployed systems (1990s) utilised PDH links such as E1/T1 links, more recent systems utilise Ethernet cabling.
More recent work has developed the concept towards a head unit containing not only a picocell, but also many of the functions of the BSC and some of the MSC. This form of picocell is called an access point base station or femtocell. In this case, the unit contains all the capability required to connect directly to the Internet, without the need for the BSC/MSC infrastructure. This is potentially a more cost effective approach.
In cellular networks, picocells are typically used to extend coverage to indoor areas where outdoor signals do not reach well, or to add network capacity in areas with very dense phone usage, such as train stations.
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The content on these sites comes from multiple sources around the world. All content is posted with a link to the origination point/source. I make no claim to copyright or own any of the content that these sites display and will happily remove anything if you so choose to contact me and state what site and which article(s) are at issue.
Other Technology News Sites of Interest:
RFIDNews.mobi, Femtocellnews.net, FollowMeFindMe.com (VOIP News), MyITJobs.mobi.
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